open science
clock | December 7, 2007The benefits of Open Access Publishing for students in higher education (video):
Most students in higher education have some experience with Open Access when doing their deskresearch. They appreciate the free access of scholar publications on the World Wide Web.
But students in higher education also develop their competences as junior researchers and publishers. Can Open Access Publishing help them to get some reputation in the international academic society? And how appreciate they the readers' feedback on papers published on the internet?
The Millennium Generation has grown up with free…
clock | December 5, 2007Communication
Communication of any kind, including communication of empirical information about the world (which includes scientific information), is constrained by three factors: technology, social factors, and, as a special case of social factors - official conventions. The term "constrained" I used above has two meanings - one negative, one positive. In a negative meaning, a constraint imposes limits and makes certain directions less likely, more difficult or impossible. In its positive meaning, constraint means that some directions are easy and obvious and thus much more likely for…
clock | December 4, 2007Bill Hooker:
But the next time you hear someone talk about the "cost" of publishing in OA journals, please point 'em here.
And the 'here' of that sentence is this post which should disabuse you, once for all, of the idea that publishing in OA is more expensive than publishing with the dinosaur publishers. Bookmark that post and have the link ready for whenever you hear that myth pop its head up.
clock | December 4, 2007David writes:
Community is no longer a dirty or scary word. Sciam, Seed, in the US, Germany and all over the world. Online communities are becoming understood and a valued commodity. When Google bought YouTube I said the price they payed wasn't for the technology (they already had Google Video) what they bought was the community. News organizations realize that creating niche communities is a way to stay relevant to advertisers and readers.
And science journalism, which de-facto covers a "boring" subject to lots of people, can only benefit by creating a vibrant community of people who have a…
clock | December 4, 2007Graham Steel, a vocal Open Access supporter, alerts me that the latest Mansbridge One on One interview on CBC features Richard Smith. You can watch the video here - the talk about Open Access starts about seven minutes into the interview.
clock | December 4, 2007JoVE, SciVee, LabAction and DnaTube are mentioned in this nice article, also found in a number of other newspapers, e.g., USA Today and Seattle Times.
clock | November 30, 2007Peter Suber reports that the Charleston Advisor gave its 2007 Lemon Award to PRISM. I first learned about this from an e-mail:
"The Charleston Advisor (TCA) announced its seventh annual Reader's Choice Awards for products and services in academic libraries, although "winning" one of these awards isn't always a good thing. For example, the 2007 Lemon Award went to the Association of American Publishers for PRISM (The Partnership for Research Integrity in Science and Medicine), the controversial web initiative created to oppose efforts to make publicly-funded research free on the web. "These…
clock | November 26, 2007Peter Suber reports the announcement of a new initiative by SAGE and Hindawi, starting a number of new Open Access journals. The platform will be unveiled in early December. They have decided not to switch their older, more established journals to OA yet.
This is really good news as SAGE is one of the largest scientific publishers, and certainly the largest so far to go from no-OA (not a single journal) to many-OA in one fell swoop. It is quite understandable that they decided to do it this way. From their business perspective, OA is still seen as risky. If brand new journals flop, it is…
clock | November 26, 2007Cameron Neylon is putting together a proposal for a UK research council to fund a network with the general theme of 'e-science enabling open science'. The network would fund meetings and travel with the specific aim of driving the open (notebook) science agenda forward. Cameron explains this in a couple of blog posts that I urge you to read:
E-science for open science - an EPSRC research network proposal, Follow on to network proposal and The research network proposal - update II.
The proposal would be to support 2-3 meetings over three years, including travel costs, and provide funds for…
clock | November 21, 2007It's been a while since I came back from Boston, but the big dinosaur story kept me busy all last week so I never managed to find time and energy to write my own recap of the Harvard Conference.
Anna Kushnir, Corie Lok, Evie Brown, Kaitlin Thaney (Part 2 and Part 3) and
Alex Palazzo have written about it much better than I could recall from my own "hot seat". Elizabeth Cooney of Boston Globe has a write-up as well. Read them all.
So, here is my story, in brief....and pictorial, just like the first part (under the fold).
The Keynote
About an hour or so before the conference, we started…
clock | November 14, 2007If scientific papers can be publicly reviewed either pre-publication or post-publication, and if one day soon the public can have a voice on the patents, then why not also grant proposals? Now, Michael does not go that far - he only proposes a more direct communication between the researcher and the reviewer - but, why not? Some people write good proposals. Others can sell them better in a different way: by talking about them. I would certainly like to be able to try to sell my grant proposal by shooting a video and posting it on a site like Scivee.com, where both the reviewers and the…
clock | November 14, 2007From California Tech:
Although some radical solutions might lead to growing pains, the present state of the industry is rather like the "Sorcerer's Apprentice" animation in Fantasia: the tools designed to support science have developed a life of their own, and are now draining the system that they were created to support by becoming a self-perpetuating industry that is moving closer to a collapse and further from enabling scientific progress.
Mark Montague B.S. '93 is volunteer staff in computer science.
The next panel discussion in the series "What's Wrong with Scientific Publishing, and How…
clock | November 14, 2007Perhaps you can win one of the Sparky Awards:
SPARC Discovery Awards
SPARC Announces Mind Mashup - A Video Contest to Showcase Student Views on Information Sharing:
SPARC (the Scholarly Publishing and Academic Resources Coalition) today announced the first SPARC Discovery Awards, a contest that will recognize the best new short videos illustrating the importance of sharing information and ideas.
The contest, details for which are online at www.sparkyawards.org, encourages new voices to join the public discussion of information policy in the age of the Internet. Contestants are asked to submit…
clock | November 11, 2007OK, back home and rested - it's time for a pictorial report, in two parts. This one is social, the other part will be about the conference itself. All of it under the fold...
Day 1
On Thursday morning I got up early, took the kids to school, loaded my luggage and got started for the airport. As my car was on empty I had to stop at the nearest gas station to fill up and, who stops behind me and start pumping gas? John Edwards. In jeans. Elizabeth was in the car. He recognized me and said Hello. I said Hello. A regular guy, in a regular car, wearing regular clothes, doing something we…
clock | November 5, 2007Back at Scifoo I met Anna Kushnir. And then we met again. And then, inspired by the conversations at Scifoo, Anna decided to organize a day-long, student-hosted conference about the future of scientific publishing - Publishing in the New Millennium: A Forum on Publishing in the Biosciences. And she decided to invite me to appear on one of the panels.
So, later this week, I will be in Boston, more precisely Cambridge MA, discussing Open Access and Science 2.0. I am arriving on Thursday in the early afternoon and leaving on Saturday in the early afternoon, so there is plenty of opportunity…
clock | November 1, 2007The fifth Science Festival is going on right now in Genoa, Italy. It is a longish affair, from 25th October till 6th November, so if you just happen to be in the area you can still make it. They have hundredr of events, e.g., exhibitions, workshops, performances and shows, all related to science in some way and targeted at a broad audience, from children to senior scientists.
I wish I could attend the session on Rhythms of Life as well as the one on Where is Science Dissemination Going?:
Nowadays, almost 2/3 of press agency releases on scientific topics are based on news given by press…
clock | October 31, 2007These last couple of days were very exciting here at PLoS. After months of preparation and hard work, PLoS presents the latest addition to its collection of top-notch scientific journals. PLoS Neglected Tropical Diseases went live yesterday at 6:42pm EDT. This journal will be
...the first open-access journal devoted to the world's most neglected tropical diseases (NTDs), such as elephantiasis, river blindness, leprosy, hookworm, schistosomiasis, and African sleeping sickness. The journal publishes high-quality, peer-reviewed research on all scientific, medical, and public-health aspects…
clock | October 27, 2007Mark Patterson writes in Bringing Peer Review Out of the Shadows:
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Hauser and Fehr propose a system for holding late reviewers to account by penalizing them when it's their turn to be an author. A slow reviewer's paper would be "held in editorial limbo" for a length of time that reflects their own tardiness as a reviewer. The short article was intended to provoke a discussion about how to improve peer review - an opening card as Hauser and Fehr put it.
So far, 16 responses have been added from readers, and the general view seems to be that incentives would be more…
clock | October 27, 2007Liz Allen posted this on the Wall of the PLoS Facebook group yesterday:
Here's a fun Friday activity for all of you who like to track the stats of the inevitable rise and world domination of OA!
Heather from SPARC turned me onto this. it's almost as much fun as watching the number of members to this group grow, we are now at 700!.
Did you know that there are currently 2893 OA journals in the directory of open access journals (http://www.DOAJ.org) and that 63 new ones came on board in the last 30 days, that's about 2 per day. Wow.
Another cool mash up site (great logo, takes a minute or so to…
clock | October 26, 2007On Monday, the U.S. Senate voted to pass the FY2008 Labor, HHS, and Education Appropriations Bill (S.1710), including a provision that directs the National Institutes of Health (NIH) to strengthen its Public Access Policy by requiring rather than requesting participation by researchers.
The vote was a veto-proof 75-19. However, the House version of the bill passed with a smaller majority, so the Presidential veto is still possible (perhaps likely). Still, this a big step in the right direction, and important battle won. Moreover, the real battle over this bill resides in some other…